The Zurich man also faces a criminal investigation and police searched his home and confiscated his computer, according to media reports and his own blog.

The prosecutor’s office said Müller, 37, admitted tweeting in response to the May acquittal on hate-speech charges of a Muslim man who said it was "Sharia-compliant” for a man to beat his wife if she refused to have sex with him, the newspaper Tages Anzeiger (Daily News) and others said. Otherwise, Aziz Osmanoglu had said, the man might be unfaithful.

Müller tweeted from his @dailytalk account, “Maybe we need a new Kristallnacht … this time against the mosques.”

The tweet was erased, but newspapers, including 20 Minuten, recovered it and other posts.

Müller also had tweeted that “we should take this pack out of the country. I do not want to live with such people” and “I would like to stand certain people up against the wall and shoot them. Less dirt on the earth would be good.”

Müller’s tweets now are open only to confirmed followers, according to his Twitter profile page.

On Wednesday, Müller held a news conference in which he apologized and resigned from the Swiss People's Party executive committee for Zurich districts 7 and 8 and from his seat on the local school board.

Roger Liebi, the party's Zurich leader, said the comments were “unacceptable.”

Müller said in his blog that he was fired from his job at a credit insurance firm after his employers learned of his tweets through the media.

Abdel Azziz Qaasem Illi, spokesman for Islamic Central Switzerland, was quoted in Islamaphobia Today as saying that Müller's party is no friend to religious Muslims. In 2009, the party had supported a constitutional ban against the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

Islamaphobia Today reported that Illi said statements against Jews are avoided in Switzerland, but "it is more common to hear anti-Muslim hate speech.”

Dr. Herbert Winter, president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, called Muller’s Twitter statement “totally unacceptable,” the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported. He said it was “very offensive” to both the Jewish and Muslim communities because it “implies that Muslims deserve Kristallnacht treatment as the Jews deserved it in 1938.”

Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass,” took place Nov. 9-10, 1938, when mobs throughout Germany and parts of Austria killed nearly 100 Jews, ransacked and burned more than 1,000 synagogues, destroyed more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses, and vandalized Jewish cemeteries and schools, the Jewish Telegraph Agency news group explained. Some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, JTA said.